This application claims the priority of Korean Patent Application No. 10-2002-0076031, filed on Dec. 2, 2002, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for authoring multimedia documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
Telecommunication service providers have recently introduced multimedia data communication services so that subscribers can transmit and receive multimedia data. That is, while only short messages, monotone phone rings, or symbolized characters could have been transmitted up to now, it is now possible to transmit multimedia data, such as images including still images captured by a built-in camera of a mobile phone, music files, or video clips, due to the development of high-speed data processing technologies in wireless networks, such as the EVDO (EVolution Data Only) technology for transmitting data at high rates of 600 to 700 Kbps and color display technologies in mobile phones. Such a multimedia data communication service for transmitting and receiving multimedia data, such as graphic or still images, video clips, audio files, etc., through mobile phones is called a multimedia messaging service (MMS).
The 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), an international convention for the next generation wireless telecommunication protocols, has agreed to use SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) in multimedia messaging services and streaming services. Accordingly, in future multimedia messaging services, SMIL-based multimedia contents will be transmitted through personal telecommunication terminals, such as mobile phones or PDA's. SMIL is a standard, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for receiving and synchronizing multimedia data through the Internet. Each multimedia object in an SMIL document has a unique URL (uniform resource locator) and can be accessed using the unique URL. Accordingly, a plurality of multimedia objects received from a plurality of different locations can be included in an SMIL document. The multimedia streaming standard for exchanging packets, recommended by the 3GPP, adopts the SMIL 2.0 Basic Profile, plus some additional functions as standard display technologies.
There are several SMIL authoring tools or editors, such as GriNS™ commercialized by Oratrix Development and GoLive6™ commercialized by Adobe Systems, Incorporated. However, most of the SMIL editors commercialized at this time can only be used in personal computer (PC) environments and the impossibility of editing SMIL documents in mobile phone environments exists. Considering the features of multimedia messaging services, it is desirable for SMIL documents to be instantly constructed or edited and transmitted in mobile phone environments. However, conventional methods of transmitting SMIL documents, i.e., multimedia data, have included undesirable steps of producing or editing SMIL documents in a PC and downloading the edited SMIL documents from the PC to a mobile phone. Further, since the existing SMIL editors are not user-friendly, editing SMIL multimedia messages using the existing SMIL editors is cumbersome for ordinary mobile phone users who do not have a sufficient knowledge of SMIL and the authoring or editing techniques thereof.